Page 18 of Mortal Shift
“I…what?” Panic flooded me, spilling into my throat and threatening to drown me in my own terror. The whole room had gone deathly silent, and even Cole’s voice had lowered to a normal volume when he spoke again.
“Drink the one that isn’t poisoned,” he said, an unmistakable note of smugness in his tone as he added, “Any shifter here could smell the difference.”
“I’m not a shifter,” I blurted, pointing out the painfully obvious. I was human—I didn’t have a shifter’s senses, and there was no way I could smell poison. Was this Cole’s plan all along, to have me kill myself in some stupid initiation while everyone watched, so they could all say I’d done it to myself?
Well, screw that.
“I’m not doing it,” I snapped. “Take them back.”
I couldn’t take the stupid blindfold off while I was holding the shot glasses, and I didn’t want to risk spilling the poison on myself—I had no way of knowing how dangerous it was or if it could kill without being ingested. Probably, knowing that sadist.
“Scared?” he taunted.
Terrified, but I wasn’t about to admit that to him, and the seventy other shifters I could hear crowding around us, each one watching to see if I’d kill myself in this stupid initiation.
Well, I had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, right? And no chance if I tried to leave, that much I was sure about.
I took a tentative sniff of one, and then the other. Identical. They both smelled identical. They might as well both be water for all I could tell. But not all poisons had an odor, and I had no way of knowing what kind of poisons they kept here.
Or why they’d have poisons here at all.
My brow furrowed.
Whywouldthey keep poisons here? It made no sense. I mean, sure, the whole idea of an academy full of supernatural creatures I hadn’t known existed a day ago made no sense, but this made even less sense. Because if they were as rowdy as any other set of college students—and clearly they were—then why on earth would anyone let them near poison?
Of course, they could have just smuggled it in with them.
…If they knew there’d be a human sent here to live with the shifters. Which they had no way of knowing, and which had never happened before.
“Come on, princess,” Cole rumbled in my ear. “Don’t keep everyone waiting.”
It was one hell of a gamble. But Cole had been surprised when I’d shown up. I’d seen it in his face. He was the only one who could have known I was coming, and he hadn’t.
Still, I couldn’t keep from taking another tentative sniff.
“Tell you what,” Cole said, a reasonable tone to his voice that I didn’t trust in the slightest. “I’ll give you an alternative, since you are only human, after all.”
I swallowed the gratitude that started to swell in my throat, because no way did I trust him. Not even slightly. Whatever he was going to suggest would be a hundred times worse than the poison that probably wasn’t poison. And he couldn’t let me die, right? That was the whole point. That was why I was here. If he could have had me killed, I’d already be dead.
So I turned my head in his direction and twisted my lips into a smile, then cut across whatever he was saying.
“Save the big speech, Fido.”
And then I lifted the glass in my left hand to my lips, and drained it in one.
At once, my mouth ignited in pain, and my eyes widened in the blackness behind the blindfold. I gasped and spluttered, and the other glass tumbled from my hand and shattered on the floor in a spray of cold liquid.
I staggered back, and a hand—Cole’s—snagged the blindfold from my eyes and smirked at me as the light seared my retinas and my mouth burned, and my blood boiled under my skin, and I stared at them all in horror.
Then Cole’s mouth twisted into a sneer, and laughter and jeers broke out around the room. Cole swaggered across the gap between us, and plucked the shot glass from my hand.
“Chili water,” he said. “And if you can’t stand the heat…”
Chapter Seven
I didn’t sleep well that night, but I did sleep—which was more than I’d hoped for, knowing that a certain asshole was sleeping literally just across the room from me. And when I jerked awake with a start, I was more than a little relieved to find my hair and eyebrows intact. I quickly dropped my hands from my face before I gave him any ideas, then glanced over at his bed. He was stretched out on his back, hands tucked behind his head, and naked from the waist up. I jerked my eyes away before they snagged on his all-too-impressive abs, but not in time to avoid seeing his arrogant grin.
“Rise and shine, princess. Don’t want to miss your first lesson.”
